This on new broadcast availabilities in our area:
From
www.vartv.com :
:// ABC affiliate to Charlottesville
It seems that there will now be an ABC affiliate coming to Charlottesville. Gray Television will be operating a "duopoly" at their new Charlottesville operation. In addition to WCAV-TV, the city's new CBS affiliate on Channel 19, the company will also operate WVAW-LP, an ABC affiliate. The station will also offer a full slate of news programming from a news department separate from WCAV. A News Director for WVAW has already been hired and she will be no stranger to Charlottesville, Central Virginia and Shenandoah Valley viewers. The News Director is Tara Brown, the current anchor of the 6 and 11PM newscasts at WHSV (3/ABC), a Gray property in Harrisonburg. WHSV issued a memo to employees this week to inform them of Tara's move. In addition to her duties as News Director, Tara will also serve as an anchor for WVAW newscasts. No further hires have been made for WCAV or WVAW, but both stations plan to post out for positions soon..... (5/19/04)
and
http://www.dailyprogress.com/servlet...75745932&path=!news
Third television affiliate to move into area
By Elizabeth Nelson / Daily Progress staff writer
May 28, 2004
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Gray Television, which will launch a Charlottesville CBS affiliate in August, is bringing its own competition. The company plans to simultaneously launch an ABC affiliate in the same building.
Both CBS WCAV-TV (Channel 19) and ABC WVAW-TV (Channel 16) will feature local news broadcasts. They both will compete with NBC affiliate WVIR-TV (Channel 29) for viewers and advertising.
A fourth station, marketed by locals Denny King and Bob Sigman as featuring Charlottesville 24 hours a day, is preparing to go on the air in late November on Channel 9.
Tami Brown, anchor for Gray Television's WHSV-TV (Channel 3) in Harrisonburg, has been hired as news director for the local ABC affiliate, which will be geared toward 18- to 40-year olds.
We're going to deliver the news, I guess you could say, in a nontraditional way, she said. Sort of a fun, down-to-earth kind of way.
CBS, she said, will have a more traditional broadcast. Though the stations will be in the same building and share recording equipment, they will have separate news staffs and reports.
The existing ABC affiliate broadcasts to the Charlottesville area from Harrisonburg on channel 64. If the FCC approves in June, the signal power will double and the Charlottesville affiliate will broadcast on Channel 16, likely increasing the number of television sets that pick up the signal, said Joseph Davis, vice president of Cavell, Davis and Mertz, consultant to Gray Television.
Davis said he did not know how many households the signal will reach, but predicted that Channel 16 will be clear in the city, Albemarle County, and parts of Greene, Madison, Louisa, Fluvanna and perhaps parts of Buckingham counties.
The two stations-one owner system is known as a duopoly. That's no longer unusual, said Dow Smith, associate professor at the Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University.
For a smaller market like Charlottesville, it makes it more financially doable for a small company to come in because they have two different channels and two different networks to sell, Smith said.
Smith said that it is unusual, though not unheard of, for markets the size of Charlottesville to have three local network-affiliate stations.
Then there's the pending arrival of Channel 9, as well as Charlottesville's current public access channels 10, 13 and 14 on Adelphia, and a PAX affiliate and PBS affiliates that broadcast local-interest stories.
That's starting to be quite a bit, he said.
If all the stations go live at their scheduled times, residents near the city could receive ABC, CBS, NBC and Channel 9 without paying for cable or satellite connections.
But Paul Jacobson, a spokesman for Adelphia Communications Corp., said he expects the advent of more free channels to have little if any effect on Adelphia's customer base. People have overwhelmingly elected to have a multi-channel video service, he said, adding that more than 80 percent of U.S. homes with televisions have cable, satellite or another multi-channel provider.
Adelphia legally must carry the closest station affiliate, meaning that when the Charlottesville affiliates come in, channels such as the Richmond-based CBS station will no longer be carried by the local cable provider.
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